Hello Readers.

As some of you may know, the original Blarnee.com went down about a month ago due to some issues on our Hosting providers end. To ensure that you still had access to all of the posts that became popular on Blarnee.com, I went to the trouble of individually transferring a lot of the posts from my database into a Blogger blog so that they could be accessed. I decided that I was ready to move on so last week I purchased AddyOsmani.com - a new website that I've been working on lately. It's already got lots of great new posts for you to checkout, so please update your bookmarks to http://www.addyosmani.com. FeedBurner and Google Reader subscribers can now get all the new posts just by subscribing at this link.

Thanks and I'll catch you over at the new site.
Addy

Hi everyone and welcome to part 2 of my "Learn in 10 Minutes" series. Last week I showed you how to learn everything about CSS Sprites and this week I thought we'd take a look at some JavaScript. In this article you'll learn how to create your very own JavaScript Carousel from scratch in under 10 minutes so without further delay, let's begin!

(Enlarge) How to Create A JavaScript Carousel From Scratch In Under 10 Minutes

I thought I would take a break from posting tutorials and articles this morning to share this with you guys - The Google Chrome conducted some market research to discover how many people really knew what a Web Browser was. It's both funny and interesting to see just how many were able to guess right.



So..do you know what the difference is between a Search Engine and a Web Browser? :)

Like me, if you’ve ever wanted to use a Web Service from a site that doesn’t have that many code examples or a solid API, chances are you may have considered using cURL – a great extension to PHP that allows you to authenticate with websites just like a normal user would. The benefits of doing this are that you’re able to gain access to rich data sources like contact lists, email, statuses and a whole lot more. In this post I’m going to provide you with 20 code examples that’ll help you do some pretty cool things using everything from Bit.ly to Las.fm. Sites covered are Yahoo.com, Last.fm, Amazon, Wordpress, Facebook, TwitPic, PayPal, Bit.ly, Twitter, GMail, MySpace, is.gd and IMDB.

1. How to shorten a URL through bit.ly
   
2. Get the trending topics on Twitter
   
3. How to get the album covers of your most recent tracks on Last.fm
   
4. Get the list of your Yahoo Contacts via cURL
   
5. How to get your very latest tweets
   
6. How to update your Twitter Status
   
7. How to upload files to Facebook
   
8. How to import your GMail Contacts
   
9. Upload files using Amazon S3 and PHP
   
10. How to login to mySpace through cURL
    
11. How to upload videos to YouTube (API reference)
    
12. How to make a post to Wordpress
    
13. How to parse out a movie's details using IMDB
    
14. How to Scape Bing.com for Search Results
    
15. How to update your Facebook status
    
16. How to upload a picture to TwitPic through cURL
    
17. How to process Payments using PayPal, cURL and CakePHP
    
18. Scrobble tracks to your Last.fm account using cURL
    
19. How to download videos in any format from YouTube
20. How to shorten a URL using the is.gd Shortening service
21. How to grab the number of subscribers from your Google Reader Account

Thanks to Amazon Associates, this month I have a new widget to display my book recommendations in..and boy have I got some good books for you guys to check out.

The first (and a title I've been looking forward to for quite some time) is John Resig's Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja. For anyone unfamiliar with the author, Resig is the author of that great framework many of us use everyday - jQuery. In this, his second book, he goes into much detail about advanced uses of JavaScript, Best practices when it comes to unit testing and a whole lot more that you won't find anywhere else. Although the book hasn't been officially released yet, you can buy an early eBook/Paperback set from Manning Publications right now (as I did) - you won't regret it!.

The next book I have to recommend is PHP Web 2.0 Mashups - I refer to this book as every Web API fans wet dream because it goes through examples of how to use many of the APIs available from popular sites like Flickr in a lot of depth. Having coded myself using many of the included services even I was surprised to learn just how much was possible by simply connecting up different APIs using a few simple lines of code. Want an example of what I'm talking about? Why not check out HousingMaps.com - a PHP Mashup between Craigslist and Google Maps that lets you find houses for sale or rent across a map in any given area.

Learning jQuery 1.3 is a good recommendation because the book is fresh off the presses, great for beginners and discusses most of latest improvements available in the framework. One of the notable improvements mentioned is the speed of CSS Style selectors - instead of using the top-down approach previously implemented, the newest version of jQuery uses a bottom-up approach called "Sizzle" - which allows jQuery to be much faster. Another improvement is the addition of .live() effects which allow you to add event listeners to any of the currently existing elements in your page as well as any future elements. What does this mean? Well, it means that parts of a page which you've updated via Ajax can also be interactively enriched without calling additional functions to re-parse the whole page. Pretty nifty, right?.

My Final 3 recommendations for this month are: Wicked-Cool PHP (A great book for people who want to skip all the "Hello world" examples given in PHP guides for beginners and instead teaches you about GD, email notifications, Web Services and tracking your users with cookies), JavaScript - The Good Parts (A book aimed at developers with an intermediate level of experience that want to know the best way to create and use Objects, Types and Arrays effectively) and finally Designing Web Interfaces - This is a first-rate book which is filled with excellent examples from popular sites such as from Yahoo, Google, Netflix, Apple and even Xbox. Unlike most HCI books which focus on desktop applications, this book is specifically about the web and delivers on exactly what you're after. It's examples demonstrate just how much the web user's interfaces have changed in the last few years and anyone designing user interfaces will find the book very useful.

That's it for this month's recommendations. Let me know if you found them useful or have any recommendations of your own!